


there's a thin line between comedy and tragedy.

by unseeliekey



Category: New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Comedy of Errors, Hanahaki Disease, Love Across The Universe: Dangan Salmon Team, M/M, Pining, Sick Character, Sort Of, Unreliable Narrator, but also an EXTREMELY romantic one, ive been rereading siken and this is where we have ended up., kind of a cynical look into hanahaki
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-06
Updated: 2020-10-06
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:40:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26856073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unseeliekey/pseuds/unseeliekey
Summary: Kokichi goes to wipe his mouth, and then remembers he’s in the stupid bright white uniform he designed and not in a multicolored mess that could distract from a few bloodstains. He reaches up and grabs a mitful of toilet paper, stuffing it in his mouth and scrubbing around the skin there. Repeats this action a few times, not looking back down at the flowers or the blood. Cleans himself as well as possible. Coughs a few more times during this process, and now that he’s seen the petals he knows just to force it out, not to make himself puke again. Catches the few extra petals on the paper.Tosses everything into the toilet and flushes, watching every bit of it swirl down the drain.One frill of a petal sticks to the back of the toilet.(or: hanahaki in salmon mode and how there's nothing more romantic than death and flowers.)
Relationships: Oma Kokichi/Saihara Shuichi
Comments: 43
Kudos: 453





	there's a thin line between comedy and tragedy.

**Author's Note:**

> hiiiiiiiiii it's me! sorry i haven't been posting much i've had an extremely busy week and i was sick (gee wonder why i wanted to do hanahaki) and! now i have bank troubles too!!!!!!! party emoji! anyway i needed to get this brainworm out its been devouring me for almost a week. sorry for the Lore and cynicism and pretentiousness PSYCHE im not sorry i rlly enjoyed writing this and im quite pleased with (most of) it. the pacing's off but ykw that's fine! anyway do give feedback if you hated this bc either way im thirsty
> 
> (this is set in salmon mode. i don't remember the specifics of salmon mode and i was not going to research them. take it for what it is!)
> 
> Warnings: potential emetophobia triggers throughout (mention of vomiting, descriptions of coughing that are a little borderline), blood, sickness, one line implying violent child abuse, mentions of violence in general, mentions of abusive relationships (but not for any named characters), kokichi overthinking, kokichi in general, one scene where a character has a panic attack. ALSO a period where (trying to describe this without spoiling) kokichi freaks out a bit about being manipulative. there are also some messy scenes around navigating relationships with something like hanahaki in general.  
> If anyone would like specific places to skip please feel free to ask!

Hanahaki is a disease for idiots.

You see it on the screen, all the time- there’s nothing more romantic than flowers and death, and you’d be hard pressed to find a love story that doesn’t at least have the threat of it pulsing in the back. Everyone has a story- your auntie’s grandmother’s father’s brother, who died, your ancestor who coughed wysteria petals all over his tragic poetry, gay man after gay man who drowned in his own blood. Girls who pressed every petal into their scrapbooks, tracking how the flowers changed as their feelings did- apple blossom, pleasure and affection, into lilies, distant and proud, into belladonna, twisted jewels of resentment. They say that in the old world, love was a weapon as much as swords or knives- but really, that’s an exaggeration. Far easier to slip poison in your lover’s wine than wait for the disease to take root. 

Everyone has a story, but no one really knows someone with it- It might be _romantic,_ but that doesn’t mean it isn’t stigmatized. If you die of hanahaki, at best you’re a tragedy. In most cases, it’s your own fault. 

And sure, sure, there’s more to it than just -love. Not always romantic. A dependence. An obsession. It just so happens that love falls into step with those so easily. And you’re always taught that it usually symbolizes some underlying insecurity in the victim- that there are three ways to treat it, and that the ideal, returned feelings, mutual adoration, will only stave the growing vines and won’t kill the roots. (Hanahaki is a disease of perception. Whether the feelings are returned doesn’t really matter. All that matters is whether the victim _feels_ like they’re receiving enough support.) There’s surgery, taking the plant, and the fixation with it (usually only performed in the later stages, when the infection gets _really_ dangerous, or for the safety of the object of fixation, in some cases.) And then there’s therapy, which ought to go along with the surgery, but also works on its own, if you catch it early enough. (But that’s not very romantic, right?)

They hand out pamphlets in health class, watch the required videos- a boy catches hanahaki for his older brother, not romantic, but obsessive adoration. A lonely girl decides her teacher is the answer to all her problems- all she wants is someone to tell her she’s clever. A wife choking up lilies months after her husband’s death. A man uses his disease to manipulate his partner- no matter what she does, it’s never enough, will stop the petals for a little while before his own paranoia drives them back out of his throat. “It’s a symptom of an underlying issue”, they say. “It’s not really about romantic love. It just manifests that way, sometimes.”

But that’s not how you see it- you never see the real people with hanahaki, just like you never see the real people with that disorder that stops you from sleeping, or a real constant amnesiac. You see them in books, and in movies, horror and romance and tragedy. You see people weeping over their high school crush- and then, suddenly, their feelings are returned, and it’s all okay. 

Kokichi knew all this. He wasn’t an idiot- he’s not one to take anything at its word, and he never really bought into the highly sappy nature of the stuff presented on tv. 

But that doesn’t change the fact that hanahaki is a disease for idiots. He’d known it ever since he was five and learning that he was a filthy little liar. Everything is made up of lies, and that’s what makes the world go around- and that goes for emotions, too. Kokichi had always been fluid, flexible. He’d never loved something so much that he’d let it consume him. 

(You could make an argument, about DICE. But DICE made him feel too safe to lodge themselves into his ribcage. And a good leader doesn’t let themself get consumed by their own feelings. Kokichi loves DICE. DICE love Kokichi. Love doesn’t have to eat you up. Just because it isn’t hurting you doesn’t mean it means anything less.)

Hanahaki is a disease for idiots, and that’s why, when one of DICE caught it, the first thing Kokichi did was call her a dumbass.

If anyone was going to catch it, Kokichi would have pinned it on Hearts, falling in and out of love with everyone he met. But, somehow, it had been his other half- Clubs, hunched over one of the bathrooms in their high school, one of the rare days they’d actually attended. (Ultimate title stuff- Apparently Kokichi had to actually be registered as a student to receive government support. Bullshit. Whatever.)  
Middle of math class. She’d been coughing, but described it like she needed to puke. Kokichi told the teacher their periods had synced and dragged her to the girls’ bathroom, second floor. She’d been shaking hard by the time she was on her knees on the cold floor, by the time Kokichi was murmuring comfort as he stuck his fingers down her throat, stroking her hair back tenderly as he lodged them against her uvula.

Saliva, slimy and thin, then bile- but not enough, not as much as you’d expect. Instead, as he pulled his hand from her mouth, blood hit his curled fingers, hot and bitter. She shook again- shoulders drawn up so high it was like some string was pulling them back, and then more bile, and then Kokichi, instinctively, was opening his palm.

If you see something shiny falling, you catch it, even if it’s glinting with spit, even if the red-ruby sheen is from blood. Even if that bright yellow that attracts you isn’t gold but petals. 

He withdrew his hand and kept petting her shoulders as she choked. Rubbed the flora between his fingers.

Threw it in the toilet with the others and called her an idiot.   
  


Turns out, hanahaki is the sort of rare disease that it requires some travelling to find a surgeon for. The surgery was covered by the government. The airfare was not. Therapy, too, had to be privately funded.  
He’d called the ultimate initiative, that night, for the second time since he’d received his title. He asked for money. They asked for what. He said medical help. They told him to get the money together. He was the ultimate leader, wasn’t he? What about all those childish heists? Hadn’t he been keeping them all alive for years? Wasn’t this the perfect opportunity to prove himself?

Fuck them. It was fine. He could handle it. Kokichi could handle anything.

It was a girl in that math class- leader of the debate club, rich, polished, everything they weren’t. Clubs fought with her All. The. Time. Kokichi had figured some of Clubs’ aggression was envy, or admiration- she wasn’t particularly hard to read. He just hadn’t realized that she wanted something like that so _badly._

They learned things, as the disease progressed, as they cared for her, as they stored up money. How in the early stages, patients tend to make themselves heave to get the flowers out, but coughing is the only way to really clear them. Don’t vomit too much, or you’ll weaken your gag reflex and you’ll have an even harder time managing food. Stay hydrated, because that’s the main thing the flowers drain from you. Track the number and volume. Pining makes the coughing worse, so provide a distraction. But time around the crush lessens the symptoms- in all the movies, being around them becomes unbearable, always ends with the protagonist dashing away to conceal a fit of spluttering. But being around her was one of the few times Diamonds seemed soothed- positive attention suppressed the symptoms almost entirely, which was a bad joke considering how much the two fought. The more time she spent with her, the less she coughed.

But the worse the coughing got when they were apart.

Kokichi stared at all his fucking ultimate papers and wondered what the point of them were. They were meant to help DICE, right? Why not fund one- one fucking surgery, one month of therapy sessions? He hated them, as much as he hated anything. Maybe this was a test. See how the ultimate leader leads his flock through a struggle. Maybe they’d cut him off if she died- so sorry, but you’re clearly not good enough! What kind of leader lets his followers get so weak and miserable that their only solace is in the company of a girl who would never, ever, get them? Kokichi hated her, too. 

(Why weren’t they enough? Why wasn’t DICE good enough? All they needed was each other, right?)

They got the money, obviously. Shipped her off for surgery, applied for the funding, got her the fuck out of that school. Kokichi had to attend, but the others could stay with her, keep her busy. Kokichi watched Hearts keep his arm around her waist, Queen brush her hair up into pigtails. Watched her sit out in the sun and smile at potplants, chest bandaged, shirt off. She was never ashamed of it, not after she recovered.  
How could she be? DICE would never let her. Which one of them hadn’t almost died a couple times? Who hadn’t let their emotions get out of control once or twice?

(Didn’t mean she wasn’t an idiot, though.)

\--

Not quite a year later, Kokichi is in the boy’s bathroom in the middle of the dumbest game show ever concocted, staring at the petals sticking to the back of the toilet. Purple and blue and white and red, red, shiny and dark.  
Past-Kokichi’s voice rattles around his ears, haughty and skeptical.

 _“You fucking dumbass,”_ he says.

Kokichi goes to wipe his mouth, and then remembers he’s in the stupid bright white uniform he designed and not in a multicolored mess that could distract from a few bloodstains. He reaches up and grabs a mitful of toilet paper, stuffing it in his mouth and scrubbing around the skin there. Repeats this action a few times, not looking back down at the flowers or the blood. Cleans himself as well as possible. Coughs a few more times during this process, and now that he’s seen the petals he knows just to force it out, not to make himself puke again. Catches the few extra petals on the paper.  
Tosses everything into the toilet and flushes, watching every bit of it swirl down the drain. 

One frill of a petal sticks to the back of the toilet. He considers picking it up, inspecting it, like he had with Clubs’. Finding out what flower it is, the symbolism, who he’s choking for.  
He flushes the toilet again, harsher, and watches the water drag it down.

When he leaves the bathrooms, he’s grinning like he’s won the lottery and he’s ready to make it everyone else’s problem.

\--

The killing game - turned dating show has dragged on for a month before it all comes spilling out. The blood and flowers, that is. Not any kind of truth. (There’s none to be found here, anyway.) Kokichi doesn’t expect they’ll be leaving any time soon- not when they’re providing such _juicy_ content like “watch Momota awkwardly prod at an assassin like he’s never learned basic self-preservation skills or how to appeal to women in any kind of capacity”. And how could anyone miss the frankly embarrassing mess that is Chabashira/Yumeno/Maybe Angie But Honestly It’s Unclear If She’s A Romantic Rival Or Just Really Into Proselytizing. Or Akamatsu and her many shiny, adorable love interests, AKA all the girls and maybe also Amami and Saihara and Momota, too. Their bright personalities are infectious. Like cholera.

No, if a month has passed and Monokuma seems just as eagerly interested in their love lives, Kokichi doesn’t expect they’ll be leaving any time soon. And he _really_ doesn’t expect that they’ll be particularly keen to pull the plug on this particular plotline.

Hanahaki- how rare! One in ten thousand people, the most romantic disease, when your brain grows so dumb and twisted that your body’s forced to follow it. Hanahaki, real and bitter and oh, so _tragic,_ right there for all their fucking cameras to capture. Monokuma’s already expressed that he was perfectly willing to watch them die before plans were changed. There’ll be no sentimentality found there. 

So, Kokichi is fully aware that the flowers are a death sentence, the moment he sees them. 

They do say that hanahaki is like lightning strikes- you’re more likely to be infected if you know someone who has it personally. But it still feels like a cruel joke, far too unlikely. First Clubs, then him. Who next? Ace? King? Mage? And, again, it makes sense that _here_ is where he’d pick it up, trapped and desperate and alone,

Maybe the moment he stuck his scraped knuckles in Clubs’ mouth, seeds were planted in his veins. Maybe the moment he saw Saihara laughing over a game of checkers, they burst into bloom.

Because Kokichi knows who they’re for, obviously. For one thing, there’s only so many people he doesn’t resent the brainlessness of. For another, he’s not exactly subtle, even with himself. 

Kokichi likes Saihara. He’s liked Saihara since the detective sought him out, despite everything, using those stupid date slots to hang out with _Ouma-_ since he said he wanted to figure him out, could learn to tolerate his lies. He’s been interested in him ever since he watched the detective (boring, passive, someone Kokichi had only considered in terms of his own talent) stand up to his friends, pose a quiet argument with Momota and Akamatsu. Curiosity piqued. And then Saihara specifically went out of his way to spend time with him, Kokichi, Ouma-kun, ultimate supreme leader. And they both liked to watch dumb rom-coms, and Saihara liked to point out all the narrative inconsistencies and Kokichi just liked to laugh at them, and Saihara had a surprisingly wry sense of humor that popped up occasionally, and out of all the people questioning their confinement and looking for a way out, Saihara was the best at it.  
(You know, other than Kokichi. The chess pieces move, castle, gambit after gambit. He watches.)

So, flowers. And blood. And coughing. And probable death, if they don’t get out of here within the next couple of months. (Unlikely.) Part of Kokichi wonders if Clubs is watching and laughing. The other part of him can’t quite bear the thought of anyone seeing him like this. Strangers, voyeurs, people drooling for his death and his body in equal portions; those he can handle. He can mock them, romanticize his own situation, spin a good old twist out of it all.  
But picturing DICE seeing him like this- their leader, their boss, the one who’s meant to keep it together no matter what-  
Kokichi doesn’t mind being pitied, yknow. Sometimes it’s pretty useful. He just doesn’t want it from the people he’s meant to be protecting. 

He tries not to think about DICE most days, anyway. They creep in, though. They’ve always crept in- Kokichi didn’t so much seek out an organization as attract it like magnets. They creep in when he watches Akamatsu and Iruma bicker and laugh together, Amami soothing Yumeno, Angie calling out to the group. 

He’s not _lonely._ He’s busy, actually, with actual, concrete plans to get out of here, actual evidence he’s collecting, and if he burns with jealousy when he sees Saihara-and-Akamatsu, or Saihara-and-Momota, or worst of all, Saihara-and-Harukawa, that’s his own business.

It’s between him and the viewers at home. He hopes they can keep a secret, spitting petals into a waste-paper basket. Kokichi’s room is already off limits with the piles of investigative work/hoarding. It’s doubly off limits with the way the bloody tissues and the stained uniforms and the piles of rotting flowers pile up so quickly. By the end of the first week he’s physically exhausted and his room is looking like a Corpse Bridal shop.

The flowers don’t even smell good, or anything. If he’s lucky and they haven’t caused much bleeding, if he shoves them to his nose they smell a little sweet. A little like rain. Maybe a bit like some kind of dew-covered herb in the summer. Most of the time it’s just rust.

But he manages! He manages. The ultimate supreme leader is not dragged down so easily- in fact, his prior experience makes him adaptable! He’s learned from his protege’s mistakes.

Sort of. He still avoids Saihara, even though he knows he shouldn’t. Kokichi stares across the dining hall and thinks _positive interactions suppress the symptoms,_ and then he thinks about how even though most of his conversations with Saihara leave him delighted, full of cotton candy, that candy often settles into a stomach ache.  
And then he hears Momota say something stupid and his throat tickles, and he has to leave anyway because he won’t let them catch him coughing.  
It’ll only get worse, he knows. He knows, and he braces himself. It still manages to surprise him just how bad it gets.

It's his own fault, really, just a collection of little things that all went too wrong. Kokichi wakes up, and he'd left his uniform draped over a chair the night before, and as he's opening his eyes and blinking sleep away, he spots the checkered scarf bundled over the long drape of the white coat, a bunch of pale violet tissue paper scrunched up over it, and the whole display of it all together has him thinking, half-awake and dreamy, that he's looked over and seen Queen leaning over the desk.  
It's not her, obviously, but the image still lingers with him as he dresses, sticks around for the rest of the day. He thinks about his clowns as he brushes his teeth, as he leaves his room, as he sits in the middle of a crowd at breakfast and makes sure they're all looking at him and he feels so fucking alone.   
The day gets worse from there- he hears Saihara laughing about something Kiibo says, and his chest tightens, and Iruma makes fun of him for a solid minute before he shuts her up and drops off his blueprints, and Monokuma heckles him when he has to disappear from bothering Chabashira to go empty his floral pockets in the bathrooms, the bear standing behind him while he retches and giggling. 

It's bad. It's pretty bad. He's in a significant amount of pain by the time it reaches evening.

It's been a hair-trigger all day, the tiniest pangs of isolation and captivity sending him into spiralling coughing fits. He's already choked in front of Iruma, in front of Akamatsu, and he thinks he's fooled them both into simply thinking it was a prank, swallowing down the petals and telling them the blood that sprayed everywhere was fake- and he's lucky for his reputation, truly, because neither of them have any sympathy for him at all when he bounces up and declares it was all a lie. 

But this fit is the worst yet.

He's in the courtyard, on the floor, in plain view, where anyone could see, and he's trying to keep himself quiet because he can hear Momota's dumb, loud, stupid fucking voice booming from around the corner, near the dining hall. It gives him a headache at the best of times, and now, alone and spitting up puddles of blood and spit for vile little flowers to float out into, he hates him doubly.   
Kokichi's whole body seizes up every time he coughs, and then he can't catch his breath, can't catch his breath, can't even hyperventilate without triggering another coughing fit that makes him feel like he's being throatfucked by Edward Scissorhands. He's lightheaded. He's right in the middle of the school, where anyone could catch him, and he hurts, and he hurts, and he hurts.

He might be dying, he thinks, vaguely, and he wonders if there are cameras watching him spill his guts over the concrete, and if DICE are watching those cameras watch him. He aims a wobbly peace sign at the air in front of him and then gasps and clutches his chest again like he can force the last of the flowers up.

"O-Ouma-kun?"

Fuck.

_Fuck._

The sound of his voice makes Kokichi sieze up even tighter, makes him gag on a particularly rough rush of petals, and then there's the sound of footsteps, someone running over, and hands on his arms, and he tries to pull away because half his brain is panicking about being touched while he's vulnerable, choked up and unable to move, and the other half is panicking in circles, running _he'll know he'll know he'll know he'll know_ over and over again. 

Saihara Shuichi pulls Kokichi onto his knees- onto his lap, practically, and squeezes his stomach, Heimlich maneuver. Kokichi chokes, everything in him going tight as a bowstring- and then he spits, this great mass of flowers flying from his throat and landing two feet away. It expands when it reaches the ground, like it was squeezed tight in his throat and needs to melt out like a sponge. All the flowers are still connected to the stem- not the individual blossoms he's used to. Kokichi stares at it and wonders how that thing ever managed to fit through his throat.

The light-headedness really kicks in the second Saihara tries to help stand him up- Kokichi stumbles, coltish, almost falls straight on his face.

“Ouma-kun!” Saihara gasps, clutching at his arm, trying to hold him up. Kokichi sways drunkenly, flapping out at him with a hand and spitting petals everywhere.

“Ffffffffuck off,” he hisses.

"It's okay," Saihara says, gripping him tighter, a thin undercurrent of panic to his voice even as he tries to keep it firm. "It's okay, I'm going to get you away from here, okay?"

It’s like a wedding gone wrong, stumbling down the aisle as Kokichi bleeds and drips corsages all over the floor, a snail-trail of spatter and soak. Unlucky bridesmaids miss every bouquet he throws- maybe he got too drunk at the reception, because Saihara isn’t quite so much carrying him over the threshold as tipping him sideways over it, where he can fall like a puddle. 

“Don’t come in my room,” Kokichi wheezes, then chokes, and Saihara pauses above him like he thinks he has any options to consider. 

**YOU ARE STANDING ABOVE THE WILTING BODY OF YOUR RIVAL. HIS BEDROOM STANDS TO YOUR NORTH, LOCKED. BEHIND YOU, ANOTHER ROW OF BEDROOMS WHERE ONE OF YOUR WITLESS COMPANIONS COULD ENTER FROM AT ANY MOMENT. THERE ARE EXITS ON YOUR LEFT AND RIGHT. YOU HAVE** **_A BEDROOM KEY_ ** **AND** **_A BLOODY FLORAL ARRANGEMENT_ ** **IN YOUR INVENTORY.** **  
****COMMAND?**

Saihara hovers, then selects **> USE KEY **, and Kokichi groans miserably as once again Saihara grabs his arm and drags him over the floor. 

He doesn’t quite tuck Kokichi in, but he leaves him in bed and with a worried glance buzzing at the back of his shoulderblades. Kokichi buries his face in his pillows and passes out but doesn’t quite dream.

\--

Someone knocking on his door. A soft voice. 

Kokichi’s heart lurches in sickly happiness at the same time his brain convinces himself it’s part of a dream. His brain, it turns out, is wrong, because the knocking continues, but that doesn’t stop Kokichi’s lungs from sowing a new garden over his bedsheets.

He sits up. Ruffles at his hair. Stretches. Tries to fix his shirt or ignore the way his whole chest aches and rattles as he moves. It feels like someone stuffed his lungs full of tinfoil. It feels like his whole torso is empty except for the snakes in his stomach- sleeping, with the occasional twitch or flicker of their eyes, like they’re waiting for him to lower his guard.

Saihara calls out again. “It’s okay,” he says. “I- I just want to check up on you. I won’t tell anyone.”

Kokichi drags himself over, his whole body made of toothpicks or concrete blocks, and he unlocks the door.

Saihara stares at him. He stares back.

“How long?” Saihara asks, quietly. 

“Four months,” Kokichi answers. It’s a lie, obviously. Obviously. 

Saihara brings a hand to his mouth, thinking. His other arm hangs low- Kokichi glances down to it and sees a dark bag, bulging at the sides. Gifts? “Before we got trapped here, then,” he muses. 

Kokichi snorts, indignant. “What? You thought any of _you_ losers are worth coughing up flowers for? Please, Saihara-chan. If that were the case, I would have killed myself to escape the embarrassment.”

“Don’t talk about everyone like that,” Saihara says, bristling. It’s kinda fun, to watch him when he’s had enough. But today he deflates, backs down far too quick, and then his eyes are back on Kokichi and they look all sad. “Can I come in?”

“Oh, heavens, no,” Kokichi replies, eyes widening in innocence. “And let you see all my evil plans?”

He seems frustrated. It’s a good look on him. “I saw inside earlier, when I was taking you in. I’m not going to _snoop,_ Ouma-kun. You can watch me the whole time. We- we can shut the door or something, okay?” He lifts the bag, and gives this hopeless little half-smile as he shakes it, a child offering an apple on the first day of school. “I brought food. You didn’t come out for dinner, so….”

A good rule of thumb is to never put yourself in vulnerable situations. Kokichi is sick, and Saihara is making him sick. No one would run to help him. If he shut the door, they’d be together. Alone. In this school full of people who might snap at any moment- who might be more calculated than that, waiting for an opportunity. 

“Well, I guess a supreme leader always should accept oblations paid,” Kokichi hums, swinging back from his doorframe. His room looms behind him, coated in tissue and plant matter, dim. He does not switch a light on. “Although normally I require a little more fanfare about it all. Come in, come in, Saihara-chan! Let’s have tea.”

"...Tea," the detective echoes. Kokichi can _feel_ him staring around the room.

"More of a coffee guy?" he asks. Saihara nods, like Kokichi is actually going to make them anything in this room without a kettle, with his chest still aching and his head all raw. "That fucking figures."

Instead of speaking, Saihara sets down his dark bag and retrieves a few items- a bento, which he sets at the end of Kokichi's bed, carefully avoiding a pile of bloody tissues, a box of painkillers, a bottle of cough syrup, a thermos, and a book on hanahaki disease- old, rotting, probably retrieved from the gross library and extremely outdated.

"I don't need that," Kokichi tells him, sharply.

Saihara looks a little embarrassed, hastily stuffing it away again. "I- I guess not," he mumbles. "I wasn't sure how long you'd... know, though, and I wanted to-" he clears his throat. "Nevermind. Um, there's rice and fish in the box and the thermos is lemon-honey tea. It's good for your throat, Tojo-san said."

Kokichi's whole body goes very stiff. He pretends to busy himself with sweeping a chair free of petals and papers. "What did you tell her?" He asks, sweetly.

"That I had a cold," Saihara replies, and then gives a few somewhat-convincing fake coughs. When Kokichi looks up, he seems quietly pleased with himself. It's disgustingly adorable. "I didn't tell her, don't worry. I wouldn't tell anyone without your permission."

"Then you will never ever tell anyone!" Kokichi sings. "Ever."

Saihara bites his lip. "Got it," he mumbles. Then, "you seem better."

"Guess I'm cured!" Kokichi replies, smiling so wide his cheeks hurt. Saihara seems unconvinced.

So Kokichi pours them both tea, and he opens up the bento, and he only has to pause to cough his lungs free of debris twice, and each time, Saihara hovers awkwardly and tries to rub his back. Each time, Kokichi swats him away. 

He learns that he's slept a whole day away, that it is past curfew once more, and that this is probably why his mouth feels like it's made of sand. Saihara suggests he brush his teeth and Kokichi asks how much he enjoys having all his fingers. 

They drink tea. It's almost sweet enough for Kokichi's tastes.

"You know my top-secret, very powerful, evil organization?" He asks.

Saihara's face does a funny little dance. "The one that's definitely real?"

"That's the one!" Kokichi snaps his fingers over at him. "I'm in love with my right hand man."

Saihara chokes on his tea, splutters a little. He wheezes so loudly that it would put Kokichi to shame. "I'm- I'm sorry?"

Kokichi's already running with this lie. If he gets it right, it's going to solve all his problems. One of his problems. "My second in command," he sighs, wrapping both hands around his mug like he's a peasant woman dying of fever. "I know, I know. Hoiw could someone like me fall in love with someone so inferior?"

"They can't be that inferior if they're your second in command...?" Saihara questions, his voice still a little warbly from the tea.

"Well, of course he's leagues above the average citizen, but no one can exactly match my level of grandeur- right, Saihara-chan?" Kokichi bats his eyelashes. 

"He?"

Kokichi raises an eyebrow. "Don't tell me you're surprised by that. I'm about as 'gay-coded villain' as they come."

“N-no." Saihara looks a little flustered, even as he shakes his head. “It’s just… odd. To think of them as a real person. Or you being in love with someone. I didn’t know you were interested in things like that.”

It stings, a little. He's not sure why it stings. 

Saihara stares at him for a moment. He sets the cup of tea down. "Ouma-kun," he says. "I'm really sorry."

"Huh? For what?" Kokichi tilts his head to the side. "It's not your fault, right? Or did you make my feelings be poor and unrequited?"   
Ha, ha.

"It must be really hard," Saihara says, his voice soft. "And you've been dealing with it all on your own, in here."

Kokichi, who doesn't like where this conversation is headed, gives him another sharp grin and folds his arms behind his head. "I was dealing with it alone out there, too! I couldn't exactly let anyone know about such an obvious weakness, now could I? In fact.... now that Saihara-chan knows, I might have to kill him too!" He pouts, lets his voice run into something of a sniffle, high and reedy. "It's not fair! Why'd you have to be so nosy, huh? Now I have to kill my beloved Saihara-chan... my favorite hostage..."

"H-hostage?" Saihara reels back in his seat, defensive. "I wasn't being nosy, I stumbled onto you! I'm just trying to help you, Ouma-kun!"

"All detectives are the same," he whimpers. "You just can't leave well enough alone...."

"I-" Saihara sucks in a breath. Closes his eyes.   
Kokichi watches with interest.  
"That's worse," he says. "That you didn't have anyone before, I mean. They... they say that there's nothing worse than dealing with hanahaki alone."

"Who says?" Kokichi asks, mockingly. "That outdated book you pulled from the library?"

"Everyone!" Saihara argues, his eyes caught alight. "Everyone says it, everyone knows that you need support if you're going to survive it!"

Kokichi drops the act. He stares at Saihara with blank eyes. "I don't need anything."

"Lies," Saihara says, and he's- actually shaking, a little. "You do need help. You were- you looked _really_ bad, yesterday." His eyes close. "It was- It was awful."

His lip curls. "I don't want your pity."

"Then take my empathy and do something with it!" Saihara snaps. "Ouma-kun, I'm not going to tell the others. I know well enough now to know that... you're not the sort of person who wants people thinking you're weak. But I'm _also_ not going to sit aside and let you die because of some stubborn streak of pride! You're smarter than this!"

That was a power move, Kokichi thinks. Roll double dice, Saihara-chan.

It's not pride. Kokichi _is_ smarter than this. He knows he can't die here, not while DICE might be waiting for him. But it's- well, it's not _just_ pride. It's danger. It's Kokichi assessing a risk. It's the fact that the whole time they've been speaking, his lungs have felt clear for the first time in weeks. That he knows he needs to cough, but it's not too hard to suppress it- not yet. 

Saihara stands up. He bows his head, stares at the floor. "I'm sorry," he says quietly. "That was... probably out of place, and you're tired. I'll leave you alone, now."

_Stay._

"Just- think about what I said, okay?" Saihara moves, then hesitates by the door. "I like to think we're friends, Ouma-kun. I... I really don't want anything to happen to you."

There's half a thermos of tea left, still warm. Kokichi lets it cool until it's gross and used up, lid off, staring at the door of his room long after Saihara leaves.

He should get up and lock it, he thinks, but part of him is waiting for Saihara to come back.

(He doesn't.)

\--

The next day, at breakfast, Saihara calls him over. Kokichi ignores him in favor of cold, unpoisoned rice and bothering Iruma. Saihara hunts him down later, anyway, and asks if he would like to go read together.

Kokichi knows it’s pity, hates it, hates _him_ , but he doesn’t say no. They walk down the basement steps, arms folded behind his head, and Saihara makes quiet, anxious conversation and Kokichi lets him stew in it. It’s funny that Saihara is so uncomfortable. A nice twist on things. 

Saihara doesn’t get any reading done, because Kokichi bothers him the whole time- and Kokichi is self-aware enough to know that his insults are a little softer when they’re aimed at Saihara, that there’s a reason his teasing is mildly flirtatious. But it still annoys him, so. Good. Kokichi will frustrate anyone any way he can, dig himself under Saihara’s fingernails to scratch at his pink skin. 

Saihara doesn’t leave, though, doesn’t make an excuse and shrink away- he snaps once, when Kokichi cuts a little too close to home with a _“pretty bad detective, just watching us rot here”,_ but he apologizes, after, tries to smooth it over.

Kokichi doesn’t let him, of course. The energy between them is restless and palpable. Kokichi is grinning. Saihara’s fingers have buried themselves into the pages of his unread book. The smile widens as he waits for the inevitable.

It doesn’t come. Saihara stays, and he doesn’t talk about it, and he doesn’t talk about it, and the more he does the more it tickles at the base of Kokichi’s diaphragm.

_Pay attention to me._

Saihara’s eyes flick back down to his book and Kokichi starts coughing, and he can’t tell how much of it is genuine and how much is just for dramatic effect. Does it matter? He bleeds, anyway.

Saihara rushes to his side and holds up a tissue, like he was prepared for this, and he stutters about cough drops and catches the flowers and offers Kokichi his coat, and Kokichi laughs and laughs and laughs until he can’t breathe.

When he gets back to his room and checks his monopad, he sees that his relationship with Saihara has increased by a bar. _Congratulations! You’ve been awarded new monocoins in Love Across the Universe._

(Pity tokens.)

\--

Kokichi read poetry, sometimes, before. Or he thinks he did- so many shuddering memories, bouncing over the folds of his grey matter, never quite sinking in. (He doubts his own doubts- how can you question your reality when you’ve always been questioning it? It’s an old character trope- the fool is right all along. For once, his delusions of grandeur are real, even if they’re still delusions.)

Poetry likes its flowers, and its pretty boys, and Kokichi’s shoulder bumps and brushes against Saihara’s as they lean over a crack in a wall together, pretending to investigate, and he thinks that some poet would have had words for this, about how it eats him up outside. His stomach is hollowed out, flipping, dizzy in a good way, but it grows teeth to devour itself every time-

Listen to him. He’d make a comparison to some overdramatic whore with a penchant for ink pens, but he’s forgotten all the author’s names.

\--

Any chronic illness (and isn’t there an inherent tragedy just in the word _chronic,_ some admission of defeat?) has its good days and its bad. There are times when Kokichi can’t leave his room because he’s too busy choking flowers all over his bed, where everything seems fine until his chest constricts so painfully that he has to flee mid-conversation, bitterly cursing every stupid thing that makes him _feel,_ makes him want. It’s like this whole stupid school is set up to mock him- friendship and romance and bonds he can’t afford to forge. Kokichi’s reputation dips and divots, but he manages it- of course he does. The sudden disappearances are just part of his charm- he keeps himself busy, meddles where he shouldn’t, builds up some kind of mystery. Saihara is the closest thing to blowing his cover- Kokichi has to snap at him, more than once, when he follows him to the bathrooms and tries to fucking- hold his hand, or rub his back. He’s a terrible liar, too. Kokichi has to give Harukawa a spiel about how he’s been manipulating Saihara into helping with one of his pranks, which gets him shoved to the ground, but has the bonus of Saihara’s cold fingers on the bruises on his lower back, murmured apologies. 

Saihara. Saihara, Saihara, who keeps checking up on him, knocking on his door after curfew every night, until Kokichi is left waiting for the visit like a well-trained dog. Saihara, who invites him out to the library to read in silence together. Saihara, who seems uncomfortable if he lets Kokichi be alone for too long.  
Kokichi is both hungry for and repulsed by sympathy. He likes to romanticize his own suffering, sure, but that’s a personal thing. He likes to lie on the cold bathroom floor and think of what a pitiful fresco he makes, all the floral pieces of him smashed together like a mosaic. Saihara’s attention burns him up like sun to a vampire, so hot and so sticky-sweet and so painful.  
 _“It must be hard,” Saihara murmurs. “Loving someone like that.” He pauses. “When… when we escape, Ouma-kun… you should tell him.”_ _  
__The earnestness makes the vines in Kokichi’s ribcage tremble with laughter. He spits out a handful of petals when Saihara looks away._

Kokichi sits in the sun at a desk, the monitors buzzing overhead, and he pours cough syrup into his soda.

\--

“I just don’t see why someone doesn’t just fuck me and get us all out of here,” Iruma is whining. “I mean, come on! It’s not like any of you are even in my league, so I’m doing you all a favor by offering you a piece of me!”

Kokichi chews on his straw and stares out the window of the dining hall. “Iruma-chan,” he tells her, flatly. “Maybe the fact that we’ve all decided we’d _prefer_ to stay stuck in this dumbass dating game rather than risk catching whatever super-high-school-level STDs you’re carrying should tell you something, pigshit for brains.”

Iruma shrieks, predictably and annoyingly, but Kokichi doesn’t pay attention. His ears have picked up a far more interesting sound.

When he glances to his left, he sees Saihara, shoulders shaking, a hand to his mouth. None of his friends appear to have noticed his little fit- he meets Kokichi’s eye and covers it up with a cough, but his eyes are still creased.

He’s laughing, Kokichi realizes. At _his_ jokes.

\--

It’s one of the good days, today. Saihara invited him out to the library again, and it looks like they should have a good few hours of peace, based on some of the drama that was going on upstairs. Kokichi’s had time now, to learn that his presence really is soothing, thick as cough syrup and twice as heady. It suppresses things- mostly. If Kokichi gets too far in his own head, or jealousy bites at his chest, or he lets himself drown in the irony of it all, then he’ll start to cough and he won’t stop until he bleeds.  
(And Saihara will rub his back the whole time, murmur comfort, and that makes it so much worse.)

Today, Kokichi thinks, is a good one, because his chest barely constricted when he received the invitation, and despite the fact Saihara is late, his throat has barely tickled at all- a few anxious coughs, but he’s fine.

“Hey, Ouma-kun.”

Saihara slides into the seat across the table, the one Kokichi has started thinking of as _Saihara’s_ seat, and gives him one of the small, lop-sided smiles Kokichi has come to adore the same way he adores an opened packet of kitkats. (Cherry flavor.) He’s all abuzz with something, it seems- eager in a muted sort of way, something interesting behind his eyes. 

Kokichi, already looking forward to being surprised, leans his chin in his hands and grins across the table. “Hello, my beloved,” he croons, enjoying the way Saihara narrows his eyes and mutters something about it being embarrassing. (A joke, with multiple layers. It’s funny to call Saihara pet names in front of the others and watch the detective behave like he knows something they all don’t, like the idea of Kokichi holding any interest in him is _laughable._ ) “Any suggestions for our book club today?”

“Ah… one, maybe.” Saihara looks oddly hesitant, but he’s still smiling, reaching into the bag at his side for something. “You might not like it.”

“Oh?” Kokichi tilts his head, swings his legs out under the table. “You do know I love controversy. Hit me!”

Saihara shuffles his feet. He sets a book out on the table. 

Kokichi takes one look at it and laughs. “No.”

The detective flushes, like _he’s_ the one embarrassed about this, biting his lip. “They say- they say that it can be helpful. To- to decipher the flower’s symbolism. It can help you process, or something.” He’s still biting his stupid bottom lip, thin but swollen. Kokichi can see where a layer of skin has worn away. “It’s usually one of the first things they do in therapy.”

“Are you my shrink, now?” Kokichi asks, brow raised, nose wrinkled. He shoves the book away. Saihara catches it. “You really think I’m the sort of person who wants you digging in my personal life?”  
Saihara’s mouth opens. Closes.  
Kokichi smirks. “That’s right.”

Still, the detective sits awkwardly across the table, clutching at the book like it might ground him. It’s all new and shiny- _Hanakotoba, with Victorian equivalents provided,_ the title reads. A book on flower symbolism. They must have put it in there just for him. Fuckers. They’re probably delighted by this nasty little plot twist. 

“Look,” Saihara says, letting out a breath. “I- I already know the flower. And I kinda know the colors, too, so…” He cuts off abruptly, shrinking back under Kokichi’s gaze. “I’m not threatening you or anything! I’m just- I won’t look without your permission, I swear.” He puts his hand over his heart, gaze all earnest and truthful and garbage and god, Kokichi hates him. His eyes are so pretty. 

He sighs, heavily, leaning his chin in his hands. “I wasn’t aware I was getting so boring you had to start doing _homework,_ Saihara-chan.”

“That’s not…” Saihara trails off again, then shakes his head. “I figure… I know it’s hard for you to be honest. But everyone likes talking about the person they like, right?” 

He stole that line from Akamatsu. Kokichi can tell, by the way his throat dips and his eyes flutter sideways the second he finishes speaking. 

The last thing he wants is to talk about the person he likes. To Saihara. Saihara the detective.  
When Kokichi first started fantasizing about detective Saihara and his eyelashes, he’d thought _it might be kinda fun to see if he can catch me._  
He didn’t mean it like this.

“They’re hydrangeas, right?” He says, despite everything, staring at the way that one stray strand of hair bobs on Saihara’s head as he reaches for the book again. “I’ve seen ‘em before.”

Saihara turns it over, opens it to the index, and then flips through the pages. “They’re pretty,” he says, thoughtfully. “Like little butterflies, I think…” He comes to a stop, trailing a finger down the page, and then stops once more. This time, he looks up at Kokichi.

 _Huh,_ he thinks, faintly. _He’s waiting for permission._

Kokichi waves a hand dismissively, like said butterflies aren’t fighting at the bars of the aviary that is his stomach. (From what, a basic show of respect? Is this really how low his standards have become?) “Blue, purple, white,” he says. “Those are what I’ve seen.”

“No pink?” Saihara asks. He gives a quick nod in response to Kokichi’s shrug. “It might just be the blood, then.” He says it so casually. Like it’s no big deal, Kokichi’s insides staining the white petals pink, pink, pink. “Okay. Hydrangeas… there’s a bit of difference between hanakotoba and European symbolism. Does that-”

“Both, maybe,” Kokichi says, lifting one hand from under his chin to stare at it, give himself anything else to do than look at the way Saihara’s brow creases as he reads. “It’s a ‘disease of perception’ so it differs depending on the individual, and there’s usually overlap anyway. For someone like me, it’ll need all the definitions to fit the complexities of my dramatic feelings into.” He snickers, moving his hand to laugh into the curve of his palm. His eyes flick sideways, up at Saihara. Saihara looks away. 

“R-right,” the detective murmurs, glancing back down at the book. “That makes sense, I guess, considering the different colors… You do have a pretty big personality.”

 _Stop it_ , Kokichi tells himself, because the simple acknowledgement that Saihara is paying attention to him, him, him, enough to piece together some kind of personality, to notice the colors of the flowers he coughs up, makes his stomach burst into butterflies again, makes his throat tickle. It’s so contrary to the feeling he gets on his own, the way his throat constricts and his lungs go full and tight. 

“Okay,” Saihara says, like he’s warming him up. “There’s… actually there’s a lot of overlap, but the central themes differ a little. It seems like in hanakotoba, the main meaning is… genuine emotion. Apology. Gratitude for understanding…” He trails off.

“What,” Kokichi says, the word a little clipped. His throat is all closed up with sap, with petals. That’s _so_ sappy. That can’t be right. Kokichi’s never had a genuine emotion in his entire life.

He hadn't noticed Saihara start looking at him, but he catches it when his eyes dip back down to the page. "Nothing," he says, softly. "I was just... wondering about your second in command. Sorry." He pauses. "You must feel safe around him."

Kokichi grins, despite the tensing in his torso. "Silly Saihara-chan. I feel safe around everybody! What's someone like me got to fear?"

"Hah, I guess so." Saihara smiles, almost to himself, as he looks over the page. "The European symbolism... Um, it still represents the same things. But at the same time... pride. Um. Frigidity, depending on the interpretation. That's interesting- here, we associate them with a myth about an emperor giving them as a symbol of apology, and with the fact their shape resembles a beating heart. But the Victorians thought they were a boastful or vain plant, because they produce so many flowers but so little seeds."

"That sounds just like him!" Kokichi laughs. "He's always bragging- so proud of himself!"   
So maybe he was wrong about both cultures applying. Unless that symbolizes himself- Kokichi wouldn't say he was _frigid,_ but he's certainly not very cuddly. And he's definitely a little proud.

"Really?" Saihara tilts his head, still smiling. "You must make quite a pair. Is he similar to your personality at all?"

Kokichi, who cannot resist the satisfaction of a good lie, even like this, shakes his head. "Oh, not in the slightest. He's very reserved. Formal. We balance each other out- he manages all the boring stuff for me, you see!"

"I see," Saihara echoes.

Kokichi kicks his feet out under the table. "What about the colors?"

"Mm..." The detective trails his hand along the page, pausing to fold against it. "Blue: apology. Regret. It can also symbolize refusal of a romantic offer, apparently, although... why would you do that if it would label you frigid...?"

"Because a lot of floral symbolism is made up and impossible to verify," Kokichi retorts. "Next."

"White," Saihara continues. "First love. But also that boastfulness, again. They can be used to symbolize a message like 'you're so lovely, but so cold to me'."

Kokichi snorts into the side of his hand. "Yep, super accurate. He can be really mean, sometimes!"  
He's not going to analyze the actual meaning of any of this. Who cares? Saihara isn't cold, but he doesn't like Kokichi the way Kokichi likes him, and that's bad enough.

Saihara's brow furrows, like he's upset on Kokichi's behalf. "I'm sorry," he says. "I'm sure he cares for you, too. He just might not... know."   
Oh, the irony.  
"And... purple," He concludes. "Purple symbolizes a desire to deeply understand someone." He looks up from the book, smiles softly. "Even after all those years, you're still figuring him out?"

Kokichi's smile feels pasted on. He needs to get out of here so he can go purge the plantlife in his chest. 

"I couldn't do it if I had a lifetime," he says, and it's not a lie.

\--

One day, Kokichi finds Saihara in an empty classroom- hunched over, hyperventilating, pulling his fringe over his eyes. He mumbles something about his hat, about Akamatsu, and Kokichi swallows down his jealousy and sits down on the desk next to him, swinging his legs.

Paper is scattered all over the room- he spots illegible writing all over the files surrounding them, a hastily drawn map of the school, some list he can’t read the writing of. All the lockers are open, the desks pushed aside.  
Overhead, the monitor pulses like a reminder. Kokichi wonders how many cameras are watching them. 

He eats candy as he waits, silent, Saihara with his face in his hands.  
Kokichi owes him, blood debt, unbearable comfort. If their situations were reversed- and they have been, so many times now, Saihara would be rubbing his shoulders and speaking to him softly. If Saihara were part of DICE, Kokichi would be holding him and saying all the right things, every perfectly curated lie he’d prepared well in advance.  
For DICE, Kokichi has a list of things to say, some true, some not. It doesn’t matter. He’d know what to say then, with a certainty built from years of observation and care. Kokichi cares about DICE. Kokichi has never - will never - love anything as much as he loves his organization. He’s known that since he was six years old and his baby teeth were scattered over the sidewalk, and he was staring at his own blood in a way that wasn’t yet familiar, watching two other scrappy kids disappear as their fosterer inched closer. He knows it now, even as the bushes growing in his chest stretch up, skyward, leaves scraping along the edges of his organs as they pull themselves into the sun. 

Slowly, Kokichi shuffles over. Saihara doesn’t react for a while, doesn’t seem to register it until Kokichi’s shoulder brushes against his. He freezes. Kokichi backs off. (Tactile comfort isn’t always welcome.) 

“I poured a whole can of orange juice into Kiibo’s circuits this morning,” he says. Saihara pushes the heels of his palms against his eyes, and Kokichi doesn’t know if he’s helping. “He started sparking, all multi-colored and shit. Started speaking spanish. I think I broke him, but it’s a good thing Iruma was there, because she fixed him up right proper! And jumped on the opportunity to drool over him, too. It’s a good thing I was there to stop her from really answering my robo-dick question for once and for all.”  
Saihara doesn’t move his hands away, but he untenses a little.  
“That’s all a lie, of course, but I still don’t want to know. It’s more fun not knowing things, sometimes! It’s like Schrodinger, or whatever. With his box, and the cat, and the particles, and it all. You know about that experiment?” He gets no answer. “It’s a thought experiment. It goes like this. There’s a guy, and he puts a cat in a box, and the box has a radioactive thing and a flask of poison, and… that part’s not really important. There’s an internal monitor that detects radioactivity- and if even a single atom decays, the glass of the poison vial breaks and kills the cat. That’s the gist of it. And there’s this thing, in quantum physics- because it’s about quantums, the thought experiment- there’s this interpretation of it that implies, after a while, the cat is both alive and dead. That’s how most people know it, right?” 

A beat of movement out of the corner of his eye. He thinks Saihara gave a stiff nod. 

Kokichi leans back on the desk and cracks his knuckles out in front of him. “But when you look in the box, the cat is either alive or dead. Not both. So the question is- when does one quantum superposition end and another occur?” He pauses. “And… I guess the point of it all is to compare quantums to cats. Because a cat can’t be both alive and dead, but a quantum particle _can._ Or at least, it can be two things at once- or at least, it can be until it’s observed. You know about that, Saihara-chan? You know that some people figure quantum particles change when they’re observed?”

Saihara nods again. Kokichi shifts his gaze up to the ceiling.

“I’m not really interested in the science of it,” he says, and it’s kind of a lie, because Kokichi does find science interesting, but it’s also not, because “I care more about how people interpret the whole thing. Is the cat both alive and dead? Is it ever? Does our observation of the event really change anything?” He pulls up his knees against him, taps his boots forward against the desk, all folded up like a monkey in a hot spring. “Some people say the cat is either one or the other, even before the box is opened. Either the atom decayed or it didn’t. Either the cat is alive or it’s dead. I think those kind of people are the worst!” He giggles to himself, tapping one boot down. “How boring, to give up any kind of control when the universe is just offering it out to you! To let it go and make a decision behind your back.”

He quiets down again to cough, catching the blood and the petals in his sleeve without hiding them. Maybe he should shut up. If Saihara cares about any of this stuff, he probably doesn’t care about it mid-panic attack.  
But Saihara moves, slowly. Kokichi wonders for a moment if he’s about to go and leave, before he shifts closer. This time, he’s the one to press their shoulders together, hesitant, and he’s the one to lean his head on Kokichi’s shoulder.

“If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” He asks, softly.

“Of course not,” Kokichi replies. “Perception is everything- right, detective?”

Saihara makes a quiet, humming sound. “If a man has a boat, and slowly, every piece of wood is is repaired, one piece at a time, until no part of the original remains… Is that still the same boat?”

“Does the man still think it’s the same boat?”

“I think he’s the one asking the question.”

“Then it’s like the cat,” Kokichi decides. “It’s both the same boat and it isn’t, until he makes up his mind.”

“What about how other people see it? If his wife thinks it’s the same boat, but his son thinks it’s a different one?”

“Then they’re both right, too.” Kokichi lets his head drop onto Saihara’s. The detective doesn’t even flinch. “It’s all lies, anyway.”

Saihara sighs. It’s a little bit shaky. Kokichi’s grown familiar with the sound of shuddery breaths. “I don’t know if the truth is _that_ flexible,” he says. “Some things do have right answers.”

“Who’s to say?” Kokichi argues, sitting up a little. He can’t see Saihara from this angle, but he can prop them both up a bit higher. 

“Well,” Saihara says, lifting his head to settle back down, this time his nose brushing against Kokichi’s hair. “If your theory is to be believed… me.”

Kokichi laughs. He wishes he could see Saihara’s face. “Do you trust yourself to be objective, then? How much consideration will you give other viewpoints until you feel comfortable in your own?”

It goes quiet again- for long enough that Kokichi starts to wonder if maybe he said something a little too sharp again, cast out with a hook that sunk right into something a little too vulnerable.

Another of those soft sighs. Saihara’s head turns again, resting fully on Kokichi’s now, his face hidden in his scalp. (Kokichi would let him stay there forever, until the roots of his hair grew out dark and tangled around his skull.) When he speaks, it vibrates all the way down Kokichi’s bones, despite how quiet his voice is. 

“I don’t know if I’ll ever feel comfortable with myself,” Saihara says, quietly. “But… I owe it to the people around me to try and be more confident. I know I do. I want to help Akamatsu-san. And Kaito… and you, Ouma-kun. So- so I’ll consider your viewpoints until I feel like I have a good conclusion for them.”

It’s so earnest. Ew. Ew, ew, sticky and sappy and too sweet, and not sweet at all. It’s cool, dripping down his spine, like a handful of dew. The hydrangeas tremble for it. Kokichi feels Saihara’s long eyelashes drag closed against his head- or he imagines they do, but either way it takes all his willpower to suppress a shudder. (Revulsion, he tells himself. Ouma Kokichi does not take sentimentality at face value.)

“That’s the nice thing about the box, I guess,” he hears himself say. “You can take your time figuring out what you want to do. The cat will be there, either way.”

\--

Something shifts, after that. Saihara comes to apologize, the next day- he calls his own emotions shameful, head bowed, looks embarrassed beyond words by it all. 

Kokichi points out that Saihara has seen him choking on his own roots, and then says that it was the calmest mental breakdown he’s ever seen. 

“You weren’t even crying, or anything!” He chirps, obnoxious, but Saihara smiles like he’s relieved and thanks Kokichi for being there, as if he did anything at all. 

Kokichi asks what he was working on. Saihara hesitates, but eventually spills that he’s been investigating the school, which Kokichi already knew, and then mumbles something about a project he hasn’t told the others about, which Kokichi didn’t know. He’d kind of assumed Saihara shared everything with his charmingly idiotic trio.

They’d already been spending a lot of time together before- pity for one of them, desperation for the other. Saihara would offer to go and read together, or to look around the school, or use one of those stupid date tickets, and what was implied to only be a short gathering would tick over into an hour, and then more hours, as they got dragged into each other’s company. They’d meet in the hallways and a short conversation would shift from their peers, to a debate on philosophy, to gameplay, to banter, and then Kokichi’s feet would be aching because they’d stood around for so long. Kokichi had tried not to think about it too much, try not to fall into the pattern of getting distracted by Saihara and then scolding himself, and then getting more distracted by wondering if Saihara was distracted by him too.

That was all stuff they were already doing. But now- Saihara seeks him out at breakfast, and midday, and after dinner. They don’t eat together, and Saihara doesn’t approach him while he’s with his friends- but sometimes he catches Kokichi’s eye, looking across the room as Momota and Akamatsu bicker playfully, and he smiles. Saihara brought him gifts before, but now they come more frequently- sliding over a bottle of panta like it’s natural. Kokichi repays him in cheap origami and games of cards and half his candy bars. 

Saihara and Ouma and their little pity-bookclub becomes Saihara and Ouma and their carefully laid investigative plans. They exchange theories of their captivity. They trade monocoins and collectable items. Kokichi lies through his teeth and Saihara tries to catch him. 

The flowers wane, for a while. They come through just as hard when they do come, but Kokichi has pockets of time- days, even, when he’s lucky, where he is busy, and he has a plan, and he has goals to achieve and to keep himself busy, and he has Saihara with him through it all. They’re solving the mystery together. They make a good team. 

_“Calm down.”_

_“I just. Don’t know. I just don’t know. I can’t- I’ve run through everything and I_ **_know_ ** _there’s more to the school, I just- I don’t think there’s any way to unlock it without them letting us.”_

_“Geez. You need a break, detective.”_

_“It’s only- midnight. Oh, wow.”_

_“Only midnight, and you’ve already got yourself all worked up! I think soooomeone needs a nap.”_

_“Ouma-kun…”_

_“If you’re good, I’ll tuck you in!”_

Kokichi falls asleep and wakes up to choke out more flowers- one, two, five, ten, one for each of his fingers. He balances them between his knuckles like dusters, like rings, arranged in order of hue. There are more purple than anything else, now. Sometimes he goes days without coughing up any white at all.

Saihara comments on it, one day, as he’s passing over the tissues he always carries, now. 

“I don’t know,” Kokichi lies, and he gives him a sharp smile with his teeth all stained with blood and sap. “Not feeling very prideful, I guess!”

And Saihara’s face crumples, and he looks- _sad,_ and he tells Kokichi he shouldn’t lose any pride, that he has no reason to feel ashamed, that he’s been doing so well, lately, particularly for someone coping on his own, that if he holds on just a little longer they’ll get out of here-

And Kokichi, who _has_ been doing well lately, laughs because he’s got it so, so wrong. 

\--

They're in the library again. It's cold in the basement. Not many others tend to come down here. That makes it perfect, because if Kokichi is lucky, Saihara might tell him to shuffle closer or offer him his coat for warmth. He usually declines, because he doesn't trust himself not to sniff it or fall asleep in it or run away and bury it in his bed, but it's still nice to have him offer.

"Kokichi?" Saihara asks, hesitantly, dog-earing the page of his book without closing it. It's one of his worst habits, dog-earing pages. Kokichi does the same thing, so it's not that he's judging, it's just a surprise coming from the detective. Composed, quiet Saihara, who folds paper and absentmindedly pulls at the threads on his shirts and bites his lip, all those little bad habits, dirty and human.

Kokichi hums in response, watching him with an enjoyment he makes no effort to hide. Saihara seems to like the attention, sometimes- he likes it when Kokichi smiles at him, but he doesn't like it when he grins. Not many people do, though.

"I was just wondering how you were doing with... you know." Saihara clears his throat, propping the book up against the table. "You've seemed- more energetic, lately? Is that fair? I was just wondering if. You were feeling a bit better."

Huh. It's been a while since Saihara's asked him a question like this- upfront and honest. Saihara isn't a deceitful person by nature, which Kokichi both admires and pities, but even he can appreciate the value of a good white lie. Tactful- Saihara is always tactful, even now.  
Kokichi debates whether he should approach with the same tact or not. It's been a while since he had to get the pieces of his Imaginary Lover lie together.

"It's good if you are," Saihara continues, oblivious to all this monologuing. "We don't know how long we're going to be in here, and it's obvious that Monokuma won't be any help, so... if the symptoms are slowing down a little, that's good."

It’s been a while since they’ve talked about it all, actually. 

“I dream about kissing him constantly,” Kokichi, whose fantasies tend to involve flirtation that cuts off before it can get anywhere dangerous or intimate, sighs wistfully.

Saihara turns a little pink, hiding his nose under his book. “R-right, of course.”

Kokichi taps his fingers against the edge of the table. A thread curls up from the end of a sweater sleeve, soft and twisted.

He pulls.

“Have you ever kissed someone, Saihara?” Kokichi coos as he leans across the table, something sly seeping along his skin, following that wool thread.

Saihara’s eyes stay resolutely fixed on the book. “No,” he says. “I’ve never really… had someone I wanted to kiss.”

“You don’t have to want to kiss someone to kiss them, silly,” Kokichi says, fingers playing at the corner of one of those pages, now. Saihara’s hand comes up, instinctive, to catch his knuckles, and Kokichi pauses, and then he pauses too, their hands linked just a little.

Saihara looks up, then down, wetting his lips. Kokichi reaches out to feather the paper again. Saihara lets him go. 

“It… doesn’t seem right to kiss someone, if you don’t want to,” he says, quietly. “It seems unfair to both of you.”

Kokichi, a liar, sighs again, pulling at the book. “It doesn’t need to be a big deal. Kissing’s nice, and you need a partner to do it. I don’t see why there’s so much sentiment attached. I’ll kiss just about anyone!”

The paper, and Saihara’s brow, creases. “Weren’t you just talking about how you daydream about kissing him?”

“Oh, well, it’s different when you like someone, you know,” Kokichi tells him. Saihara’s eyes hover over his face for a moment- searching for something? Kokichi is all laid bare. 

“That makes sense,” the detective says, after a moment. It feels like summer in the desert. This school is so cold, so closed shut.

“Is there anyone you want to kiss here?” Kokichi asks, and he feels roots spread through his ribcage.

Saihara’s face twitches, a little.  
“No,” he lies.

Kokichi digests this information. He hadn’t expected a lie, but he should have, shouldn’t he? Lies are what make the world turn, and there are so many of them here, shiny, lovely, laughing. Who wouldn’t want to kiss one of them? Let he who is without sin make the first move. 

His chest feels tight and full, all of a sudden. 

“You can practice on me, if you like,” Kokichi offers, dragging his finger over the corner of the paper. Like he’s a toy, something to practice _on_ but not _with,_ because he knows better than anyone that you want to keep your distance from Ouma Kokichi, that you should kiss him on his bleeding mouth but you should not put your hand with his.

Saihara makes a sound like he’s drowning. Kokichi laughs, laughs, shoulders shaking and hydrangea petals trembling in his lungs, and he pulls his hand back sharply from the page to tell Saihara it was all a lie, but what comes out is “you’re no evil genius, Saihara-chan, but you’re pretty cute. Maybe we can forget our loneliness together, a little arrangement between two pining friends, a little-”

Saihara cuts him off with another distressed noise, which was expected. What wasn’t expected, however, was him reaching out, his long, cold fingers around Kokichi’s wrist, pulling it between them.  
Distantly, Kokichi wonders if Akamatsu has offered to teach him to play piano with his lovely hands. 

“You’re bleeding,” Saihara says, and for a moment Kokichi wonders if his body has betrayed him yet again- before he manages to pull himself away and look down, the red beading on his fingertip. “It must be a papercut.”

Kokichi’s blood drips onto Saihara’s cold hand. He can practically see it burning.

“Come on,” Saihara says, standing up, moving away, and then reaching down to pull Kokichi with him, ushering him away from the table. “Let’s go find a first aid kit, okay?

Kokichi stares up at Saihara. He is still bleeding, bleeding. Slowly, he presses the pad of his fingertip to the back of Saihara’s palm- intentional, slow. When he pulls it back, there’s a red thumb print stabbed into the skin. There’s a joke there, about detectives, and taking prints, and being caught red-handed. Kokichi doesn’t give the set-up, though, and Saihara doesn’t have a punchline to follow through with.

He’s not bleeding very much, really. It’s just a papercut.

Kokichi says “kiss me,” and maybe that’s the set up for the joke. 

The punchline is that Saihara does.

People say that you’re more attractive when you’re in love. Kokichi wonders if he looks better with his cheeks flushed, blood dripping down his lip. He pulls back, hands still either side of Saihara’s cheeks, and watches the way the detective’s eyes flutter open as they part, how his gaze flicks over his face, stares at him.

Saihara pulls Kokichi back in by the sides of his shirt, tugging lightly, guiding him forward. His eyes are already slipping shut again when he leans down.

One, two, three. Their mouths brush over each other as they lean together, slow and far too tender. Arrangements between two pining friends don’t go like this, but, oh, Kokichi is a liar and a thief and he wants and he wants and he wants and Saihara is so kind. 

Kokichi thinks of his first name, and he wants to say it- his lips form _Shu,_ slide open into an _i,_ but any sound he makes is swallowed and Saihara’s hands are at his sides and Kokichi is gripping at his shirt.

He hears other people calling Saihara by his first name and he hungers for it, jealously, wants to feel how it sounds in his mouth- he sings out _Shumai,_ and that’s close enough, insincere flattery, but he wants it. Momota might know how Saihara’s name feels in his mouth, but he doesn’t know how his tongue feels, doesn’t know what it’s like to run his fingers through his hair- not ruffle but pull, and he bets that Saihara wouldn’t kiss him this tenderly, wouldn’t have to lean down like he leans down for Kokichi, wouldn’t let him end up with his back against the wall.

It’s a funny image- six feet of internalized SOMETHING with the anxious detective tugging at his obnoxious coat. It’s funny. 

Kokichi doesn’t quite cough, but suddenly his mouth feels full, and the kiss breaks anyway, and he has to lean sideways to pull petals off his tongue. He can’t meet Saihara’s eyes.

Saihara’s hands hover, and then slide up to rub his shoulders. The rotting bookshelf is cold against his back. It’s almost cruel, how gentle it all is. 

“It’s okay,” Saihara says, softly. “We’ll find a way out of here, Ouma-kun. And… and then you can go and kiss him, like you want to.”

Kokichi stares at the floor. He’s almost surprised by how miserable he’s managed to make himself.  
When he looks sideways, he sees bright spots of color in his palm- he curls his fist up and crushes them.

“Again,” he says. 

Saihara watches his face, like he's looking for something there. Kokichi gives him no overly-framed smile, no scowl, no crocodile tears. He doesn't even blink. 

"Okay," Saihara murmurs, his hands moving up to cradle Kokichi's jaw, and Kokichi's eyes are already closing. "Just one more."

\--

The next day, Kokichi and Saihara lock eyes in the dining hall, and Kokichi doesn’t give him a chance to make it awkward. He slides into the seat next to him, as if he belongs there, as if he’s been sitting there all along, and he tells Saihara a story about a girl who dropped a pearl from her mouth every time she told the truth, and it- well, it ends up getting very dark, because she marries this prince, you see, but his infatuation with her beauty soon becomes infatuation with her monetary value, and he orders her to tell him nothing but the truth, and he is so wrapped up on having her speak, recite these long lists of true facts, that one day he tells her he loves her as they head to bed and she returns the sentiment, as she has ever since they married; only this time, no pearl accompanies it.

Saihara says that he heard a similar story, about a girl who spat up roses. That one had a happy ending.

Kokichi tells him not to be stupid. All those thorns would cut her throat up, and then the prince would have no one to use, anyway.

“Is it a true story?” Saihara asks, thoughtful as ever. His eyes are a little distant- in contemplation, or simply trying not to focus on Kokichi’s face?

“Obviously not,” Kokichi replies, grinning. “What’s the fun in telling stories that are true?”

There are no roses when he has to excuse himself and cough all down his shirt, but his throat feels cut raw anyway. 

\--

Hm. Hmmmm. Hmm. 

Kokichi, staring down at half his lunch and also quite possibly an entire bouquet’s worth of whole hydrangea flowers, comes to the conclusion that guilt and obsession are Not Good for hanahaki.

Or, they’re _very_ good for hanahaki, and very bad for him.

The more he stews over it, the worse he feels. He fucked up. He fucked up _bad._

Issue A- now Kokichi knows what it's like to kiss Saihara, knows what it's like to hold him and be held, and he doesn't think he can handle the prospect of not doing it again. Only he has to handle the prospect. Because it is not happening again, because even if Kokichi lies awake at night and thinks of Saihara and his mouth and his eyes and his hands and coughs up one flower for every single detail that sticks to the back of his mind- even if he does that (and he won't admit it, if he does,) Saihara most certainly does not.

Issue B- out of the heat of the moment and with time to replay every interaction in slowed, excruciating detail, Kokichi feels... a little grimey about it all.

Being manipulative is fun and sexy and evil. He likes to arrange events to get what he wants. He likes to take people and use them, figure out their fears and desires when they make it so, so easy, and he likes to set up dominoes and push them over. All of human interaction is manipulation, Kokichi knows this- guilt-tripping, flattery, generosity, white lies, hard truths. Genuine emotion or not, everyone wants something and will try to get it. You can be truthful and earnest and still use and hurt others. You can be a liar who doesn't care and still make them happy. Sure, you can't help crying, but you chose to let people see you cry, right? Kokichi doesn't resent the manipulative- he enjoys clever frivolity, social interactions that serve a higher goal.

At the very least, he likes to be manipulative on _purpose._

Not whatever that was. Not using his potential death to get kisses from someone who doesn't like him- who explicitly said he didn't see a point in kissing someone he didn't like, and oh yuck. God. He feels gross.   
It hadn't felt like that at the time, it had felt- It had felt like Saihara wanted to kiss him too, while it was happening; he didn't need to put his hands on Kokichi's sides, against his fingers, didn't need to guide him up against the wall and lean in for another kiss after the first- and he didn't need to make that last kiss _linger,_ didn't need to make it seem languid and sad with his hands framing Kokichi's shoulders, like they had all the time in the world. He hadn't needed to kiss him at all, it was a joke, it was a joke, and even if Kokichi meant it, that doesn't mean Saihara had to-

He probably felt pressured. He was probably overwhelmed with pity. 

Kokichi thinks of all the movies with hanahaki in them, all those tragedies, all those too-intense romances.   
_Love me back or I'll die,_ they say, and in a place with no other options he can't let Saihara know the truth of it.

This is not fair on Saihara. He’s doing a really dirty thing here, sneaky and wrong, taking advantage of this sympathy. Kokichi should have never asked, but he should have never put himself in a position to ask in the first place.

Time ticks by, and Saihara is a little quieter, a little more distant, fidgety and red when Kokichi teases him. And Kokichi gets worse- The symptoms, suppressed into something managable, are back in full force, worse than before- bad as the night Saihara found him for the first time. 

It's just not sustainable. 

He thinks he has a few weeks left, at least. Based on the investigations he's done with Saihara, he can probably make some decent progress into firmly cracking the mystery of this place before he goes. He'll leave them all a key out of here, and nothing else.   
Hopefully Saihara isn't dumb enough to go looking for his organization once he's out. He seems like the type to try and fulfill a last wish, or something.   
Kokichi grits his teeth and doesn't think of DICE, and he works.

\--

He avoids Saihara successfully for about four days before he catches him- literally, in the hallway outside a row of classrooms. Kokichi grits his teeth and swallows a wave of petals and tells himself it'll be fine.

“Ouma,” he gasps, and it sounds like he’s struggling for breath. Instinctively, Kokichi reaches out, hands on Saihara’s arms, balancing him the same way he’s been balanced so many times before. “I- I need to tell you something.”

“Jumping straight into it, are we?” Kokichi laughs despite it all, because what else is there to do? “I’m all ears, Saihara-chan. I do owe you one!” He owes him a lot.

Saihara glances around, and they’re alone in the empty corridor, but still his hands fix on Kokichi’s arms and they’re gripping each other, tangled up. “Let’s… the library?” He asks, a little weakly. “Let’s go sit there for a bit?” He doesn't even mention how they haven't spoken in a few days, how Kokichi's been avoiding him like the plague.

Distantly, Kokichi wonders what has him in such a fluster. Maybe this is the confession he’s been hoping for. Maybe he’s found a cure. Maybe he figured it out. Maybe this is utterly unrelated.

Maybe he’s planning to get Kokichi alone to start up that killing game.

Kokichi doesn’t really believe that, but it lingers anyway, because he’s never trusted anything, not even himself. The threat of death pulses in his lungs, and in in the base of his skull, now, and distantly he wonders if the floral roots are rotting his brain, too, because part of him wouldn’t even mind if he died for Saihara, if Saihara was able to take his life and use it to crash through every part of this fucking hellhole-  
There’s something wrong with him. He'd be scared that he was thinking that if he wasn't too busy being disgusted by it, instead.

Yet he lets Saihara pull him down the dark steps by his hand, and when he asks if he plans to murder him in the dark, it’s just to watch the way Saihara splutters and scolds him, to laugh it off as they move down to the basement, step-step-step in time.

Before they move into the library, Saihara glances about in an incredibly suspicious manner, and, after they move in, shuts the door behind them.

Kokichi is half-expecting to be met with a knife in his throat. He folds his arms behind his head and bares it. “What’s up, Saihara-chan? You seemed so flustered upstairs!”

“That’s, ah.” Saihara flutters with his fingers. It’s sickeningly adorable. Literally.

Kokichi tilts his head, eyes wide. “You’re making me nervous, you know!” A truth that sounds like a lie. “What could my beloved possibly want from me right now?”

“Your-” Saihara cuts Kokichi off, then cuts himself off with a little, muted sound, a hand coming up to brush against his throat. Kokichi mimics it, blindly, tugging at his scarf. Watches Saihara watch him with dim eyes.  
The detective inhales. Closes his eyes. Reaches into his breast pocket. Exhales.  
“I have something for you,” he says.

Kokichi’s eyes flicker from his face, staring instead at the hand still hovering over his chest. “Oh?” he asks. “A present, before we’re set out to be doomed?”

Saihara’s face twists and changes, going through a few emotions before it settles on- nothing, just tight, drawn up. Hard to read. He pulls a scrap of fabric from his pocket, white and neat, and then holds it out with a stiff arm, like he’s trying to avoid contagion. He’s looking away.

Kokichi picks it up. Unfolds it. Stares.

“They’re- snapdragons,” Saihara stammers, still looking away. Kokichi can _hear_ him swallow, the library silent and moulding as ever. “ _Antirrhinums._ They symbolize strength, because they grow in rocky places, a-and deviousness, but they also symbolize grace. And, um. Deception. But also protection against deception. A-and, those, uh, those are pink and red ones, they represent.” He swallows again. “Romance and energy.”

Kokichi stares at the flowers. They’re fresh, a little bruised, snapped from their stems. A handful of blossoms in a little, neat bundle. He thinks he sees blood on the fabric.

“They’re for you,” Saihara says, and then he physically cringes back. “I- I don’t mean- god, that sounded so manipulative, I just. It’s you. I mean. Fuck. It doesn’t- I don’t need you to return the feelings, I know you have someone else, that’s okay, it doesn’t. It’s just that in all the books on it I read they say that if you have a close relationship to your point of admiration, you should tell them, so-”

“Me?” Kokichi asks, as his heart picks up- heavy, fast, sustained. The well-pruned shrubs in his lungs tremble. “For me?”

He looks up. Saihara is already looking at him. 

The detective hesitates for a moment before he nods, and a tiny smile, self-deprecating, tugs at his mouth. “Yeah,” he says, softly. “It’s… ironic, I know. I just wanted to stop you from suffering, but I guess… I got infected, myself.” He chuckles, but when Kokichi looks at his eyes all he sees is aching- mirrored, familiar. “It's not your fault, it's just... I guess I'm a dependent kind of person. It was worth it, though, I promi-”

He doesn’t get to finish the sentence before Kokichi is kissing him, again. Their mouths lock, petals scatter everywhere, and Saihara lets out a surprised sound as Kokichi fists at his coat, pushed right up onto his tiptoes to swipe his tongue over his bottom lip.

Saihara stumbles, then catches Kokichi against him, and then kisses back, and for a few, sweet moments it is blissful, before he withdraws to cough- and this time Kokichi sees the flowers as they come, pink and sweet and stained with blood, but it doesn’t matter because Kokichi’s mouth tastes like blood, too, has for months now, and he kisses him again, anyway.

“Wait,” Saihara gasps, a little croaky. “Your second in command-”

“Saihara Shuichi,” Kokichi says, tugging a little indignantly at his shirt. “I am a _liar.”_

"I know," Shuichi frowns, instinctively reaching up to touch Kokichi's elbows, somewhere between balancing and placating him. "I just talked about how snapdragons symbolize deceit-"

Kokichi doesn't mean to keep interrupting him, really, but sometimes someone is just _so_ stupid, all you can do is kiss them. And kiss them again, because this time, they're kissing back, and when you break apart, even though they look no less confused, they're smiling.

"There's no second in command," Kokichi explains, and he had imagined revealing it like a magician finally pulling away the curtains on his biggest magic trick; but it comes out softer than he had expected. Playful, but not in a… annoying Ouma unpredictable way. It comes out in a voice that's almost… hesitant. (Only Kokichi never hesitates.)

Saihara's brow furrows, and Kokichi can practically see the gears in his brilliant, stupid brain turning. "But the hanahaki…." 

He trails off. Kokichi takes sudden and intense interest in one of the bookcases to their left.

A hand traces along his jaw, not quite moving his head, just the suggestion of it- but that's enough to pull him along, and suddenly he's looking up at Saihara again, who is staring at him like he- like he-

No one has ever looked like that at Kokichi. He doesn't know how to categorize it, what part of his brain to file it away into except for the part to _KEEP_ , the part where he should tuck all his most important memories.

"Ouma-kun," Saihara breathes.

"That's me," Kokichi says, a little removed from it all. Everything's hitting him all at once, now. 

"How long?"

He fidgets. Rubs his fingers over Saihara's coat, frays the fabric with his restlessness. "About a month after we got trapped here. After we hung out in the dining hall and you made that really, really stupid joke about getting naked and then got so embarrassed about it that it looked like you would give anything to take it back."

Saihara goes red. "I- in my head it was funnier!"

"Oh, no, it was very funny." Kokichi isn't laughing, but he does grin, his heart beating at his chest all out of time, shaking the flowers there. "How long for you?"

"After we kissed." Saihara looks away, still tinged pink as his snapdragons. "I, um. I'd been relying on you a lot, with- with the investigation, and everything, and you were... you're such a good distraction, in the best way, and. And being with you got so relieving, and we stopped talking about that... stupid second in command, and then, just- we kissed, and I. I was so jealous. I wanted it to be me. But I also thought I'd never be enough to keep anyone's interest- let alone yours, so..." He makes an aborted gesture at his own throat. "Flowers."

“I-” Kokichi bites his tongue. The hydrangeas shiver in the wind. “I did this to you.”

Saihara blinks. “What- no! No, no, no, Kokichi, please, don’t think like that.” He reaches down for his hands, squeezes them tight between them. Kokichi looks away. “It’s not your fault, just like- it’s not my fault it happened to you, either. It’s this stupid dating game, the environment…. They say hanahaki is kinda memetic, you know? It’s not anyone’s fault.”

But it still doesn’t sit right with him- he’s sure Shuichi means what he’s saying, but. But.  
“I made you kiss me,” Kokichi shuts his eyes. “I’m a liar.”  
Deceit in all things- he was an idiot if he ever thought he could escape it in love, too. But it makes him feel slimy, makes all that crawling, twisting guilt strike back in full force. No wonder the disease has gotten worse. It’s hard to feel soothed when he’s thinking about how he demanded for Saihara to kiss him. 

Saihara blinks, looks at him. Slowly, their fingers link, and he shifts, bumping them together, his own dragging Kokichi’s forward, until his index presses down- right into the spot he’d pushed his blood in, all those days ago. Where he’d left his print. He hadn’t thought Shuichi had noticed, but here he is, pushing Kokichi’s fingertip into the same spot.

“I,” Saihara begins, and then stops, and when he speaks again he sounds a little breathless, like his throat is filled with snapdragon. “Really wanted to kiss you.”

Kokichi looks down at their hands. He draws a little circle with his finger.

“Afterward, I thought…. I thought it was bad of me, to- like I was taking advantage of you, but- I mean. I didn’t even know I wanted to do it until you offered, and you had offered, so I just- I did it, and I didn’t feel bad about it until you started coughing-”

“I wasn’t coughing.”

Saihara laughs, sweetly. “Until I felt flowers in my mouth. And then… and that’s when I realized that I wanted to. That I _had_ wanted to. That I… I wasn’t just trying to comfort you.”

Kokichi frowns, still watching the way his stubby little nails scratch at Shuichi’s skin, black nail polish flaking. “I just. Figured you wouldn’t say yes. And then you did. And I wanted to kiss you, and you kissed me-”

“I did,” Saihara says, quietly. “I did kiss you.”

Kokichi nods in agreement. He did kiss him. He did. “I thought it was a booby prize.”

“A booby-”  
The indignation in Saihara’s voice gets Kokichi to look up- the detective’s face all scrunched, his brows pulled together, looking almost offended. Kokichi laughs at him. 

“That was my first kiss,” Saihara says, a little defensively. “You really think I’d just- do that for you? Out of pity?”

“You really think I’d go around smooching people while I was bleeding flowers out of my guts for some imaginary dream-man?” Kokichi counters, a little hysterical. “It was you, dumbass! It was always you, ever since the hundredth round of rock-paper-scissors- since the first time you decided to use a stupid date card on me, and then you came _back._ I like detectives, and I like challenges, and I like games, and you just keep- you just keep-”  
Kokichi pauses. He coughs up a bundle of hydrangea. Saihara reaches up with their joined hands to catch it, and he lets go of Kokichi’s fingers to wipe the blood off, almost delicately, as he wheezes.

“That was just a lie,” Kokichi says, lying. 

Saihara smiles down at the flowers, then opens his palms and lets them flutter to the floor. It’s like someone looted a floral store, here. 

“Kiss me?” the detective asks, and Kokichi does. 

There aren’t any flowers, this time- they both taste like blood, still, but that’s okay, because even if Kokichi wasn’t used to it by now, he’d kiss Saihara if he tasted like dirt. If his mouth was covered in poison. If he spat up little pearls every time he spoke.   
His hands in Saihara's hair. His teeth on Saihara's bottom lip, tugging gently at the chapped skin, his chest pressed to his, hearts pulsing, flowers in his ribcage turning to the sun, and he wonders if Saihara feels filled up by it, too, if he's aching in the same way.

They part, slowly. Breathe together. It's gross, a little sappy, a little sticky, all rust and rotten flowers. 

“We both have issues.”

“Well, yeah.” Saihara laughs, again. Just as soft. “And I… don’t think this whole experience really helped. We should go to therapy.”

“Couple’s counselling? Already, Shumai?” 

Saihara goes a little pink at the pet name, leaning their foreheads together. He pulls Kokichi in by his waist. "Well, maybe. I'm not sure. I haven't really read anything about what you do when you _both_ have hanahaki." He pauses, and raises an eyebrow. "Probably because no one else would invent an entire fictional unrequited love interest to cover up their emotions. You could have just told me you didn't want me to know, you know. I wouldn't have pried."

Kokichi sticks his tongue out. "And risk you figuring it out? No thanks. Besides, how do you know that this wasn't part of my devious plan to make you jealous all along?"

"Make me jealous by pretending your hanahaki for me was for someone else?" Saihara asks, pointedly. "It seems very convoluted, Ouma-kun."

"Well, it worked, didn't it?" Kokichi asks.

Saihara opens his mouth, and then closes it. Pink slowly inches over his face, a cloud of color tinting his skin. He looks away.

"You can call me Kokichi," Kokichi tells him. 

That's enough to drag his eyes back, to set his fingertips slowly stroking over Kokichi's cheekbones. "Kokichi," Saihara says. "Ouma Kokichi. Kokichi."

"This is the part where you say I can use your first name, too."

"I thought that went without saying."

"Maybe I wanted to hear it."

Saihara smiles, beatific and beautiful, the sun lighting up all over his face. His eyes crinkle, just as lop-sided as ever, even when it's big enough to stretch his whole face.   
"Call me Shuichi," he says, and then, after a moment, adds, "please."

"Shuichi," Kokichi says. 

Shuichi hums his name back at him. Kokichi says it again.

Shuichi.

It tastes as good as he thought it would. Like pollen. Like honey.

\--

There’s a hydrangea bush in Kokichi’s ribcage, pulsing through his bones and inside his lungs. _Ajisai,_ water-drinker. Shuichi checks in every morning, every evening, to make sure he’s kept hydrated, drops him off water and sugary soda in the afternoons. He checks in with him in the night, when he creeps down to meet Kokichi in his bedroom, to go over their next set of plans. Kokichi lies next to him and presses their palms together and tells him lies, feeds blueberries to the flowers in his diaphragm. They plot, together- not just how to escape, but what to do when they do (because they will.) How to adapt, who to find, post-it notes in Shuichi’s illegible scrawl.  
Laying together, their pile of blankets is a flowerbed, their bodies walking fertilizer, and Kokichi resents the plant that can be suppressed but not killed- not yet, anyway, but he’ll come at it with clipping shears himself, if he has to- they'll get out of here and find doctors, and surgeons, and therapists, and they'll cut out the parts of them that don't believe they'll be loved. He worries. He wouldn’t be Kokichi if he weren’t a twitchy kind of paranoid, laying with his head on Shuichi’s chest like he can hear the snapdragons there, make sure they’re behaving.

For now, there’s a garden in the dark, under the covers, and the flowers are prettier when he knows they won’t kill him.

Still, it blooms, it blooms, it blooms.

**Author's Note:**

> fun snapdragon facts i didn't really have the space to include but i want you to know anyway! Although they symbolize deception, they've also been used as a charm to ward off lies. There's also an old myth that says concealing one on your person will make you more charming/interesting. (does it count if you're concealing it in your lungs?)
> 
> also im going to think abt this from shuichi's perspective but i will not write it bc i have TOO MUCH other stuff to write but know i am thinking about it. please think about it also. same dealio with... them escaping/winning the game. many thoughts head full
> 
> my tumblr, instagram, and ko-fi are all at unseeliekey!!! (also if u have ideas for ko fi gifts lmk. i may open commissions in the future when i am less busy but we will ssee!)


End file.
